1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print apparatus of a serial printing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A print apparatus of a serial printing method is known in which a carriage on which a print head is mounted reciprocates to perform printing. If a side edge of a sheet to be used rises, the print head may hit the edge of the sheet when the carriage passes over the edge. If the hit occurs, there is a risk that the sheet is tangled with the carriage to cause a sheet conveyance jam or the print head is damaged.
To cope with the problem, an apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-88389 presses down the sheet by the bottom surface of the carriage even if the sheet rises by employing a positional relationship in which the bottom surface of the reciprocating carriage does not run off the edge of the sheet. Thereby, the print head is prevented from hitting the edge of the sheet.
A print head requires periodic maintenance. For example, an ink jet print apparatus does not always use all nozzles for printing, so the inside of nozzles that do not eject ink frequently may dry to cause ejection failures. To avoid this, when the print head reciprocates to perform printing, a maintenance operation of nozzles called “preliminary ejection” is performed once for every predetermined number of times of printing or once for every predetermined period of time. In addition, maintenance operations such as an ink suction operation in which nozzles are capped and ink in the nozzles are sucked while printing is performed and a wiping operation for wiping a surface on which nozzles are formed may be performed.
If a maintenance unit is provided in the apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-88389, it is necessary to provide the maintenance unit at a position apart from a recording area. Therefore, when the print head is moved to the maintenance unit, the bottom surface of the carriage is apart from the sheet, so the print head may hit the edge of the sheet when the print head returns to the recording area.